Recently, we started receiving nightly logs of the Thunderbird start page hits. It now comes to us nightly, and I also got some historical data back to June 2008.
For the time being, I've just been feeding them all to webalizer, for lack of a better idea. There is not yet a complete plan as to what to do with all that data. Right now, it goes straight to infinite storage every evening. There is a lot of it, averaging at around 8 million hits a day, The included graph is the average traffic per hour of the day. That's in the 300k-500k hits per hour! I am glad that this traffic is being served by the mozilla.org hardware.
I know folks have already started to think of ways we could mine that data to learn useful things about Thunderbird and its user base, but it's only beginning. So, for the time being, I'd like to hear from anybody who can think of a questions that could be answered by all that data. Of course, respecting our users privacy is important, so I don't want anybody to know anything about specific individuals, just about trends. Are Russians users checking e-mails more often than us Canadians, for instance? (Not so sure that's a very useful thing to know)
Got a cool idea ? Have something you'd like to know ? Please, let me know.
<gozer at mozillamessaging dot com>
